Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Abortion and the Ascendancy of Arguments for Choice

The racial politics of
abortion partly arises from the current framing of abortion as a right to
choose. The ideas of choice and privacy privileged in Roe did not speak to the need for state support of reproductive
freedom, either in the form of financial support or protection against
coercion. In explaining the persistence of the choice framework, studies tend
to focus on Roe itself. The Court
framed abortion as a matter of privacy, legitimating arguments based on choice.

As my current project shows,
the emphasis put on choice arguments did not follow inevitably from Roe. In the mid-1970s, abortion
opponents secured a string of victories, ensuring passage of the Hyde Amendment
and winning several cases in the Supreme Court. Mainstream abortion-rights
organizations attributed these defeats to the advantages the opposition enjoyed
in electoral politics. In crafting a new political strategy, the movement
emphasized arguments thought to have the broadest public appeal. The idea of
choice, many concluded, had more public support than did the abortion procedure
itself.

Conflict about the
desirability of a choice-based frame continued throughout the 1970s, as
feminist women’s health activists argued for a more comprehensive idea of
reproductive freedom. Women, as activist Meredith Tax put it, had a right to
have children as well as a right to abortion, and that right required
government assistance with health care, child care, protection against
sterilization abuse. In the period, women’s health activists criticized the
idea of a right to choose. Women, they argued, needed a good deal more than
freedom from state intervention.

By 1981, however, even
advocates like Tax began to focus more exclusively on abortion and choice-based
claims. As Tax saw it, her colleagues had little choice, with Ronald Reagan in
the White House and Congress seriously considering statutory or constitutional
strategies to overrule Roe. Roe came under constant and serious
attack. It simply did not seem realistic to make the kind of nuanced arguments
or far-reaching demands that characterized Tax’s reproductive-justice agenda.

The politics of choice in
the 1970s and beyond reflected far more than the Court’s own framing of the
abortion issue. The meaning and relevance of choice, moreover, set the terms of
other battles, including those on conscience clauses and the defense of
religious freedom. In fact, in debate about marriage equality and abortion, conscientious
refusal today is more relevant today than ever. Why and how this came to be the
case will be the subject of a future post.